Original Face

Send in the marines

    It is time to retire the old satiric song of Tom Lehrer's that held to the cliche that the military's job is just to "kill people and break things."  It is time to recognize that there are times in which force is required, indeed, in which the lack of force is shameful for the commonweal.  This is one such time and Burma is one such place.
    It is just about a week out from the natural catastrophe that has destroyed a good part of the Burmese delta community.  The lowest estimate of dead, which, at the time of this writing, is already 72 hours old, is 40,000 with another 30,000 missing.  However, these numbers are, by all reasonable estimations, very, very conservative.  The real numbers approach 100,000 dead with untold hundreds of thousands stranded without potable water, shelter or electricity and with rotting corpses acting as perfect breeding grounds for a variety of infectious diseases.
    They need help, desperately.  The international community has been quick on the scene.  Having learned valuable lessons from the South Asian tsunami of a few years back, the United States, the European Community and other nations have assembled the necessary personnel and materials to begin to restore hope in the delta.
    There is a road-block, both metaphorically and physically.  The military junta that has ruled Burma for the past several decades has refused all but the smallest trickle of aid to enter its nation.  It has refused to issue visas for relief workers, including doctors and nurses.  Each request to help is encountered with neglect, red tape and, in almost all cases, denial.
    The reasons for the junta's pernicious disregard for the lives, safety and welfare of its citizens are long and, in the end, immaterial.  What is material is getting materiel to those who need it.
    It is time for the trucks and jets to be on their way.  If they encounter resistance from the junta's army, our military and those of allies should make it known in the most clear terms possible that such resistance will be futile and fatally counterproductive.  It is a task that the world's armed services could and would, if asked, perform with excellence.
    The ever cautious diplomats will counter this proposal with the threat of China, the junta's only friend, getting involved against us.  Let China try.  With the Olympics only a few short months away, China's intervention against assistance to an unimaginable number of dying people will sicken and disgust the international community and cause these Games, and their host nation, to become laughingstocks.
    Please, write your elected officials.  Do it now.  The Burmese people cannot wait any longer.

Is this a trend or what?

    So let me see, Italy just voted for a right of center government which is favorable to the United States and its foreign policy.  France recently voted in a right of center government which is favorable to the United States and its foreign policy.  Canada has a right of center government which is favorable to the  United States and its foreign policy.  Germany has a right of center government which is favorable to the United States and its foreign policy and, if the polls are to be believed, it is fairly likely that Britain will vote next year for a right of center government.
    Then why do the Democrats talk incessantly about the United States, under President Bush, losing allies in the world?  I guess the singular loss of Spain to the Socialists has been too much for them.

Blood oil

    For weeks now in Boston the radio air waves have been saturated by commercials from Citizens Energy by its founder, Joe Kennedy, stating that the oil which it sells comes from a company "owned by the Venezuelan people."  But in these ads, Kennedy goes further.  He castigates those who oppose taking the oil from Hugo Chavez's regime.
    Chavez is the latest thug embraced by the Left.  Like Che Guevara, Chavez is lionized and hailed as a "courageous fighter against American imperialism."  What they don't say about Chavez is that he is a through and through anti-Semite whose actions, as well as words, compare to the early days of the Nazis.  This week, Chavez's storm troopers have once again vandalized the Jewish quarters of Venezuela's cities in a manner reminiscent of Kristallnatch.  He has done it before.  He has gone on the air a number of times with the same "questions" about the "Jews in our midst" which we have heard before in pre-war Germany.  His has reminded his listners of the ancient "blood libel" and that a cabal of Jews control the world's financial markets, that they are manipulating these markets in ways that make them the enemies of Venezuela. He has boasted about making his country, indeed all of South America, Jew-free, or as the Nazis called it, Judenrein.
    How dare Kennedy.  But, hold on, wasn't Kennedy's grandfather and namesake a major public sympathizer of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime?  That's right, he was.  Maybe the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

   

Now you see it, now you don't

Magicians stock in trade is slight of hand...getting us, the audience, to see something over here while they really are doing something over there.  The same is true in diplomacy.  This week's charade in Annapolis was one such example. 

Although the meetings had been billed as an advance of the Israeli/Palestinian question, the real agenda was what to do about the common and profound threat to regional and world stability what would be occur with Iranians having a nuclear capability.  It is an issue upon which all of the participants, Arab and Jew, can readily agree. Iran's leaders have a eschatological view of nuclear weapons negating the usual deterrent strategies which employ a sense of mutually assured destruction to keep the missiles at rest.

The facts that Ohmert's government lacks the standing to enforce any sort of peace, the Palestinians are fractured between a super-militant Hamas majority and a declining Arafat wing and the the United States interests in the middle east are more focused elsewhere should be enough to make any serious observer recognize that something else is afoot.  Even Rice's opening remarks were merely a re-hash of the 2003 proposal that a much stronger Israel and Palestine rejected.

What will be the real outcome of the meetings?  A consensus, behind closed doors, to allow Israel to do what has to be done to rid the world of Iran's threat.  Of course the Arab states will denounce and wail, but that will be merely for consumption of their own streets.  There will be the pro forma condemnation in the UN General Assembly and a US veto in the Security Council.  But nothing of consequence will happen.

With good luck, perhaps this common threat might even bring some small measure of rapprochement between Jews and Arabs. Although that is unlikely, the old Arabic saying is that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend."  So, maybe peace between Israel and the Palestinians may result after all from this week's Annapolis parley.

136 and counting

Saudi Arabia has just beheaded its 136 person for 2007.  At this pace it will not break its all time record of 191 but there is still a month to go and one never knows what sort of "Hail, Allah" plays those rascally Islamic judges might have up their hajibs!

Who wears the pants

Al Qaeda militia members in Iraq murdered a man Friday in front of his three sons calling him an "infidel."  His crime?  He wore western style pants.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot.  They were relatives of his. 

Lovely people, Islamofascists.

Riyad delenda est.

In a series of documents found at a senior Al Qaeda "safe house" recently is a listing of the mujahadeen in Iraq.  An analysis of that material demonstrates that over 60% of foreign fighters come from Saudi Arabia.  The Saudi government's complicity and duplicity in middle eastern conflicts have been known but unstated for decades.

Enough. 

It is time again to call the truth, the truth.  The Saudis are not our friends.  They are not friends of the West.  They wish us no good.  They wish us harm.

Our foreign policy must be based upon a clear knowledge and expression of facts, not wishes.  It may be inopportune or violate some sense of real politic to upset the status quo by calling the Saudis what they are, but the sooner we do, the better off we will be.  This is not a fight we can hope the toothfairy will make better. It will require sacrifice and pain on all of our parts, but we have no choice.

The fight by Saudi Arabia has already begun.  When will we face up to that fact?

Will they get it now?

In a meeting with British members of Parliament, Iranian officials confirmed what President Ahmadinejad told a Columbia University audience two months ago, that homosexuals should not only be executed but should be tortured first.  The Labour MPs expressed their dismay and displeasure with that position, according to The Times.

It reminds me of that great scene in Woody Allen's movie "Manhattan" when Allen, at a cocktail party in the MoMA garden is chit chating.  He says that he had heard that the Nazis were going to have a march in New Jersey.  Yes, one woman remarked, she had heard that too and was going to write a strong letter to the newspapers about it.  Allen says that action was required instead.  No, says the woman, a letter will do.  Allen is perplexed.  He says that he found that with Nazis baseball bats work better than letters.  But the smug woman sniffs arrogantly.

Will the Left finally get it?  The Iranians are not nice victims.  They are evil people who wish to destroy Western culture.  Even though George Bush sees this does not mean, that by reflex, the Left should oppose Bush.  To do so, especially for many members of the cultural Left, is to sign their own death warrants.

Expressing dismay and displeasure, just isn't even close to being enough.  Sometimes baseball bats or similar implements are required.

Brush up

This is the vigil of St Crispin's Day.  Shakespeare's address of Henry V is one of the most wonderfully powerful pieces written in the English language.  Its power is more than rhetorical, as great as that may be,for it also strikes at the heart of living for values that transcend one's ordinary existence.  It is worth reading once a year.

    What's he that wishes so?
    My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
    If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
    To do our country loss; and if to live,
    The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
    God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
    By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
    Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
    It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
    Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
    But if it be a sin to covet honour,
    I am the most offending soul alive.
    No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
    God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
    As one man more methinks would share from me
    For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
    Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
    That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
    Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
    And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
    We would not die in that man's company
    That fears his fellowship to die with us.
    This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
    He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
    Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
    And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
    He that shall live this day, and see old age,
    Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
    And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
    Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
    And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
    Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
    But he'll remember, with advantages,
    What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
    Familiar in his mouth as household words-
    Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
    Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
    Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
    This story shall the good man teach his son;
    And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
    From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remembered-
    We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
    For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition;
    And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
    Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

 

Way to go, Mr. President

The President hasn't had many encomiums in the past year or so, including from me.  So it is with particular enthusiasm that I applaud his decision to attend with the First Lady the ceremony next month in Washington honoring the Dalai Lama.  No president has ever met publicly with him for fear of offending China's political sensibilities.  Bush will break with that sad tradition.

It is important to note that the current President Bush knows of the PRC first hand.  His father was the American ambassador to Beijing during the 1970s and the younger Bush had opportunities to visit and observe.  His decision is all that more impressive in that it is a clear reputation of his father's accomodationalist policy with China. 

As the Chinese increase their sword rattling against Taiwan, and continue the cultural genocide of Tibet, the witness of the President will give a much needed morale boost to those embattled by the PRC.  Good for you, George.